Patrick Gamble
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Berlin 2016: Crosscurrent review
★★★★☆ The Yangtze River has played an important part in Chinese history, bringing life, death and industrial growth to the country. Beijing Film Academy graduate Yang Chao’s Crosscurrent uses the river as its driving force, its current acting like the hands of a clock pushing time forward. Traversing China, from the riches of Shanghai’s financial…
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Berlin 2016: The End review
★★★☆☆ Guillaume Nicloux reunites with Gérard Depardieu – following last year’s Cannes title Valley of Love – for The End, a lean, spiritual voyage into the unknown. Opening with the sound of a dog barking and the ringing of an alarm clock, the first shot of Nicloux’s latest sees Depardieu strewn atop his bed in…
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Berlin 2016: Creepy review
★★★☆☆ Creepy (Kurîpî) marks Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s welcome return to genre filmmaking. Based on the novel by Japanese author Yutaka Maekawa, Kurosawa’s latest does more than enough to warrant its moniker even if it fails to live up to expectations. Distinguished detective and criminal psychologist Koichi Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is called in to interview a young…
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Berlin 2016: Things to Come review
★★★★☆ “Only in movies do women over forty leave their husbands,” remarks Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) whilst discussing her impending divorce with a former student. She’s right in one sense: how often are the lives of women over forty represented in film? Things to Come, Mia Hansen-Løve’s follow-up to last year’s EDM drama Eden, finds itself…
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Berlin 2016: Lily Lane review
★★☆☆☆ Hungarian director Benedek Fliegauf, winner of the Silver Bear in 2012 for his bleak and brutally affecting thriller about the persecution faced by Hungary’s Romany community Just the Wind, returns to Berlin with his sixth feature, Lily Lane (Liliom Ösvény). A harrowing journey between two worlds, one haunted by past mistakes, another populated by…
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Berlin 2016: Our picks of the festival
The 66th Berlin International Film Festival opens later today with the Coen brothers’ star-studded caper Hail, Caesar!. Starring George Clooney, Channing Tatum and Tilda Swinton to name but a few, the Coens’ latest is destined to steal the industry headlines. But don’t let the Hollywood nostalgia of the festival’s opening gala mislead you: the Berlinale…
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DVD Review: Aferim!
★★★★☆ Radu Jude’s Everybody in Our Family (2012) was a critically revered, yet criminally little-seen comic satire about the fragile fabric of contemporary Romanian society. Jude’s follow-up Aferim! (2015) marks a noticeably tonal, if not entirely thematic, departure from the intimacy and immediacy of his previous work. Set in the southern Romanian region of Wallachia, in…
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Film Review: ‘Tangerine’
★★★★☆ An acerbically funny yet emotionally engaging film about friendship and the surprising alliances that arise in marginalised America, Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) is a riotously entertaining portrait of life on the streets of LA. Baker has cultivated something of a reputation for telling conventional stories about unconventional characters, from an illegal Chinese immigrant struggling…
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London 2015: ‘I Am Belfast’ review
★★★★☆ The city as a symphony of long-forgotten memories, Mark Cousins’ ode to his hometown, I Am Belfast (2015), is a refreshingly hopeful depiction of a place habitually represented in cinema as a battleground of sectarian violence. In Cousins’ latest essay film, Helena Bereen plays Belfast, the city personified as a 100,000 year-old woman; a…
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Film Review: ‘Red Army’
★★★☆☆ The 1980s might have seen a thawing of Cold War tensions between the US and the USSR but in sport, when East played West the whole world was watching. Sporting events between the two nations were seen as surrogates of the war, and although the Soviet dream was fading, The USSR’s ice hockey team…